


Antes y Despues

by Catwithamauser



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Angst, Darkest Timeline, Gen, Origin Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-29
Updated: 2016-09-29
Packaged: 2018-08-18 07:14:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8153528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catwithamauser/pseuds/Catwithamauser
Summary: Murder night was not the first terrible night of Laurel's life, hell, it wasn't even the first murder night.Or, Laurel contemplates before and after.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little something written to address the couple of throw-away lines in 301 about Laurel's dad not being able to go back to Mexico, and going to visit her mom there for the summer. I'm fairly confident this will be destroyed by canon within a few eps, so wanted to do something with the idea before it is...  
> I am full of angst, especially at 3:30 in the morning when this was written, so this fic is the darkest timeline. Basically. This fic is smol sad Laurel, possible state sanctioned gun violence and parental abandonment, you've been warned  
> Canon typical violence present in this fic.

When Laurel was a child she used to stare at the timelines in the back of her brothers’ history textbooks, look at the dates, wonder how everything could suddenly shift so thoroughly, so completely in the world that it required a date in the textbook, a date delineating the change. She’d wonder about the before, about the after, wonder if anything could be the same after something so monumental, after what her brother Daniel called ‘black swan events’. 

_1519- Cortes conquers Mexico_

_1810- War of Independence begins_

She’d stare at those dates, those and a thousand others, wonder at their certainty, the definitiveness with which they presented themselves as facts. How everything was one way before and then 1519 comes and nothing is the same after. The entire world has been changed, even the air, the earth changed.

When she was a child she always took them at face value, believing that the dates were set in stone, that there was nothing open to interpretation, no slow creep before the change occurred, that it was merely like flicking a light switch and everything was different. Sudden, irrevocable and total.

 _Cortes conquers Mexico_. She didn’t think about the years of struggle, the years of bloodshed and oppression and starvation that lead to the conquest, just accepted that in 1519, everything changed. Before and after.

She certainly didn’t think about what it might take, what it might look like in her own life to carve out a date like a little notch, before and after, whether that change would come quite as suddenly, quite as completely as the dates in the back of her brothers’ textbooks.

And in some ways, Laurel eventually knows, it doesn’t. Even the most sudden, earth shattering event, even the most complete shifting of the landscape is predicated by ripples, by tremors, by little warnings sent up from the earth. The key, Laurel can only know later, much later, is to be in a position to see them, to watch for them, to make the connections necessary to see the oncoming meteor before it crashes into the earth. Before and after.

But when she’s a child, she notices nothing, or can’t make the connections between what’s happening around her and what comes later, between the rumble of the earth, the receding water, the rushing sound like a jet engine and the wall of water that comes, later, a tsunami to drown the earth; can’t make the leap from the flame, the dry tinder, the scorched earth to the later inferno that consumes everything in its path.

So when Laurel is six years old she doesn’t understand who her father is, his position, his status, doesn’t understand the people that skulk into her mother’s kitchen, late at night, early in the morning, covered in dirt, exhausted and bleary eyed and speaking to her father in hushed, urgent whispers as they sip whiskey and her mother’s tea. She doesn’t understand either the uniformed men who sometimes knock on her father’s door, demanding his presence, demanding answers from him with dark looks, guns clenched tight in their arms like newborn babies, doesn’t understand either the men who don’t need a uniform to sanction their violence.

She doesn’t understand yet that her father’s a politician, that he has spent his career courting the workers of Monterrey, challenging the ruling party, the ruling class, that some of the way he challenges the establishment is by moving outside political channels, with violence and sabotage and by aligning himself with the petty neighborhood strongmen, the dealers and armed thugs who move outside of politics, of the left/right divide, outside of society itself, fighting the brutal rule of the city’s powerful men with his own brand of violence, turning himself into a man that is probably as much criminal as politician.

Laurel certainly doesn’t understand that her father’s work puts him straight into the crosshairs of men far more powerful than her child’s brain can conceive, far more committed to maintaining their wealth, their power than perhaps even her father understands, people who make the laws and, like her father, operate outside it, do what they wish because there's no one strong enough to stop them. She doubts her six year old self had even heard the term political assassination, doubts she would have understood what it meant if she had.

She doesn’t understand that her father holds himself out as a politician, but the local politicians, the police police chief, the entrenched political class of the city view him as a criminal, as a man that must be destroyed if society is to function. He’s both, Laurel admits to herself later, both and neither, but at six years old cannot see the full range of things he does, the full spectrum of legal and illegal and semi-legal practices her father employs in his quest for power and change and his own self-interest.

At six years old, she only sees fragments, the tension in her mother’s voice sometimes, like a wire strung tight, the tension in her arms as she hugs Laurel, kisses her temple and softly urges her back to bed when she wakes in the night, creeps into the kitchen for some water only to be faced with the curious, impatient stares of familiar men with unfamiliar steel in their gazes, anger on their lips.

She sees too her father’s clenched jaw, the anger lurking under his words when he speaks, his absence felt echoing through the house every time he leaves, like her mother, her brothers are unsure whether he will return, waiting on the edge of a precipice, waiting for the fall.

She sees only fragments, like she’s been handed only half the pieces to a puzzle, like she’s trying to read a book in a language she only barely speaks, overhearing a whispered conversation in a crowded train. She doesn’t understand yet, what it all means, how to make the connections necessary to understand the way her brothers do, to know when to stay quiet, when to retreat to their bedrooms or down into the street to kick, despondently, at a soccer ball while shooting furtive, mulish glances back at the house. Laurel only knows something is wrong, wants to know more, to understand, so she clings to her mother, presses her little face against the windows, wraps her arms around her father’s thick waist until he pulls her off with a glower.

Sometimes she sees him on the small, fuzzy television in the living room, his hard face even harder from beyond the screen, eyes flashing and arms cutting through the air like knives as he makes his speeches, urging change, urging unity, urging resistance. She doesn’t understand the words he speaks, but she can understand the sentiment behind it, can feel the anger, the passion radiating out of her father, his disgust, his burning desire for change. She presses her tiny hands against the screen, draws her fingers across her father’s face, traces his eyebrows with her thumb, lines her fingers up with the span of his mouth, watches her father appear on the screen and a stranger with hard eyes take his place.

Its only much, much later that Laurel understands what occurred, what leads her from her home to the U.S., to Palm Beach, what leads her to the silence and the simmering anger of her father’s mansion; begins to see that it was all a gradual disaster, like cancer slowly infecting a healthy body, that it was a long, lingering death, withering and consuming and not, as she had long thought, a sudden, staggering death, a heart attack, a single shot straight to the chest.

But for a long, long time, all Laurel knew was the splintering of the front door late one night, the shouts and heavy bootfalls of men on the stairs, of her mother bursting into her room. And what came later, Laurel knew that too. Laurel still knows what came later, like it was burned into her brain, carved into her heart. She doesn’t think she could forget it if she tried. And she did try, spent years trying in futile, failed efforts to erase that first terrible night from her mind.

She wakes, one night shortly after her sixth birthday, heart pounding in her chest, wakes at the shattering of the front door directly below her bedroom, the cracking of the wood sending tremors through her floor. Her eyes are wild, but she knows enough to stay quiet, stay still. Her tiny hands pull the covers up, up to her chin, knees drawn up to her chest, trying to make herself small, trying to will the bed to swallow her up.

It doesn’t work, because just as she shuts her eyes, tries to force herself to ignore the shouting outside her bedroom, the pounding against her walls, her mother bursts into the room. She’s half dressed, hair mussed and hanging around her shoulders and Laurel can’t help but notice how the buttons of her shirt are mismatched, how her eyes are still smudged with sleep. She stares at the gaping buttons, the missed buttonhole, stares at them until they’re burned behind her eyes because her mother is always, always, orderly, put together and Laurel’s brain cannot catch up to this new woman wearing her mother’s skin.

“Laurel,” he mother hisses, her voice a hushed whisper. “Wake up now.”

There’s a tension, an edge to her mother’s voice that Laurel has never heard before and which commands her to obey. It’s sharp like cracking glass and Laurel holds out her arms to her mother, lets herself get bundled into her arms. “Where’s daddy?”

“Hush,” her mother commands, voice soft but full of steel. “No questions _mija_.”

Laurel nods, whimpers into her mother’s chest because the pounding coming from below her hasn’t eased, has been joined by angry shouts, by the frightened shrieks of her brothers.

Her mother gathers Laurel’s tiny body into her arms, lifts her up with practiced movements even thought Laurel is far, far too big to be carried like a baby, her arms under Laurel’s legs, against the span of her thin back.

Laurel presses her face into her mother’s neck, breathes in her soft, familiar scent, light and fruity, but now there’s a current of fear that rises from her mother like mist, a metal tang that hits Laurel’s tongue and steals her breath because she thinks it reeks of blood.

She’s jostled, sudden, hard in her mother’s arms, peeks her head up and her nose brushes against the barrel of a gun, pointed directly in her face.

Laurel wants to scream, wants to shut her eyes tight and never open them again, wants to drop from her mother’s arms and run, run until her throat burns and her legs give out. Instead her eyes widen, widen until she thinks they will burst, her teeth sinking into her lip so she doesn’t make a sound, doesn’t move a muscle, her body so completely filled with fear she’s not even capable of flinching.

“Put her down,” the gun tells her mother, Laurel’s eyes incapable of fixing on anything other than the cold, dark metal of the rifle.

“No,” her mother says, voice so cold, so firm Laurel barely recognizes it, the sound of an immovable object fixed in its position.

The gun swings higher, pointing now, Laurel thinks at her mother’s face instead of her own. “I said,” the masked man behind the gun says, sound edging into a growl. “To put her down.”

“And I told you no,” Laurel’s mother repeats, her voice deadly sharp, like knives held light and ready to strike.

Laurel can feel her mother’s heart beating a slow, steady tattoo against her own racing chest, feels the slow, steady pulse of blood through her veins, can feel the simmering anger humming in her skin, an inferno raging just below the placid surface.

She thinks at the time her mother is too angry to be afraid, only later realizing she too could get to a place beyond fear where there is only sheer, grim determination to come out the other side alive and whole, where there is no room left to feel anything at all.

The man grabs Laurel by her arm, grasps her through the thin material of her t-shirt, hard enough Laurel cries out, certain she has the man’s fingerprints tattooed against her skin, and yanks her from her mother’s arms, throws her to the floor even as Laurel reaches out, tries to grasp her mother’s skin, keep from being torn away.

She expects her mother to resist too, to reach out for Laurel, try to cling to her, but her mother simply allows her arms to fall at her side, jaw clenched and sharp, allows Laurel to be taken from her arms, thrown against the floor. She looks at Laurel, sprawled on the floor, watches tears of pain and terror begin to slip down Laurel’s cheeks. And when Laurel can focus on her mother again, focus on anything other than the pain in her arm, the fear she feels every time she thinks of the gun, her mother’s eyes drill into her, pin her in place, command her to be silent, be still and unmoving like a stone.

The masked man turns his gun then, the butt flashing forward and drilling, deep, into her mother’s sternum, doubling her over in pain with an exhale that echoes through the hallway, the sound solid somehow, heavy and thick, given its own life by the breath its stolen from her.

She doubles over, nearly falls, both hands against her middle, just above her navel and Laurel can hear the sounds of her mother’s wheezing breath, ragged and small.

“Move,” the masked man commands, tone bored and colder than Laurel thinks she’s ever heard a voice before, not even from the man who looks like her father on the TV.

Her mother meets her eyes, holds her terrified gaze and nods, and if her mother’s breath hadn’t been coming in short, desperate gasps, if her eyes hadn’t been filled with distant pain and if Laurel herself hadn’t been nearly shaking out of her skin with fear she’d be reminded of the same little nod, slow and encouraging while it still acknowledged her fear, her hesitation, that her mother gave her on her first day of school some months ago.

Laurel begins moving, slowly at first, her eyes darting back over her shoulder to watch her mother, the masked man, consumed by the need to know everything, to see everything, to not glance away in case it’s the last time she sees her mother, desperate not to have the last thing she sees be the natty, faded wallpaper of the upstairs hallway. She does this, drags her feet and glances over her shoulder, eyes still big and unblinking, taking everything in, until the barrel of the gun whispers against the space between her shoulder blades, insistent, and sends her tripping forward.

“Down the stairs,” he tells her as the pressure of the gun against her skin increases until all Laurel wants to do is run, until she wishes it would simply break her open, send her blood and organs spilling out all over the hallway stairs.

She hears her mother’s familiar footfalls behind her, changed now, heavy and clipped, as though fear has suffused every aspect of what was once her mother, stolen everything good and soft and loving from her.

When she makes it down to the living room her three brothers are already there, but her father is not. She’s startled, somehow, by his absence, more startled than she thinks she’s been by anything else that has taken place. She was relying, she thinks, on her father to protect them all somehow, to use his sly smiles and his sharp tongue and his calculating eyes to somehow figure out a way out of the trap, to smooth over the situation with a quick smile and a joke like he does with the sometimes flaring tensions of the men who crowd her mother’s kitchen or with a hard, cruel eyed look and clipped words and the proud straight backed cast to his shoulders as he follows the guns out to their idling car, follows them down to the police station to answer a series of questions that always seem to take the better part of a week and return her father to them with hollow eyes, hollow cheeks and bruises where no bruises should be found. Every time he returns to them he returns to them harder, crueler, more forceful in his convictions, his certainty that the only solution is change, is revolution, the tearing down of the world so that it can be built, fresh and clean.

But this time, instead of returning, he is simply gone, vanished like he was never there at all. Laurel knows she saw him at dinner, can conjure up the feeling of his hand against the back of her head, cradling her as he pressed his lips to her forehead just before she went to her room. And now, now it is only her brothers.

Daniel, her oldest brother stands in the middle of the living room, Adrian and Julian, pressed tight against his sides, Julian’s face buried against his skin and his eyes shut tight. Both Daniel and Adrian’s faces are ashen, white with terror and she thinks she can see the tremble in their limbs, the desperate shaking that comes from fear and confusion and pain. There is a red mark, bright and raw above Daniel’s temple, another across his jaw, a trickle of blood leaking from a fresh split in his lip and Laurel knows that by morning his skin will be dark and black with bruising. Daniel’s in only boxers, Adrian and Julian in shorts and t-shirts rumpled with sleep, hair mussed and wild and if this were any other night, Laurel would laugh, card her hands through their hair to ruin it further, stick her tongue out at the dark looks they’d send her, giving her long suffering sighs and eye rolls because she’s the baby and the only girl at that, and can get away with practically anything.

Where’s Daddy, she wants to ask them, but her mother commanded her not to ask questions, told her to stay silent, so Laurel clamps her mouth shut and tries to imitate the hard, defiant clench of Daniel’s jaw, the flash of rage in his eyes. He looks like her father, Laurel thinks, has the same resistance in his bones that she sees so well in her father. Except this time, her father is gone and there is no one left to resist but Daniel.

There are three more men in the living room, copies of the masked man who follows behind her, their guns held lazily in their arms. They all look up as Laurel and her mother enter, sharply, fingers tightening their holds on the weapons and Laurel finds it hard to swallow back her whimper as the rifles turn to her. She wants to run and press her face against Daniel’s thigh too, wrap her arms around his long, long legs and press herself against her brothers and let them swallow her up until she no longer exists.

“Where’s your husband?” the man closest to her brothers throws out lazily, clearly directed at her mother, stepping into the room after her.

“I don’t know,” her mother says, voice clipped and Laurel doesn’t need to turn, doesn’t need to look behind her, look back at her mother to know she is lying. Laurel has known her mother her whole life, has fallen asleep to the distant tones, the cadences of her mother’s voice more nights than she can ever count, heard her mother’s voice at her highest, her lowest; when she learned to speak and walk and ride a bike and when she had pneumonia and could barely breathe through the fluid in her lungs and when she broke her collarbone falling off the swings the year before. She knows her mother’s voice and she knows now that she is lying, would stake her life on that fact.

“You do,” the man insists, voice tight with anger, recognizing the lie same as Laurel does. “He entered the residence at 7:42 p.m. and never left.”

“Then he must still be here,” her mother spits, mocking.

“He’s not,” the man says, eyes frigid, narrowing in anger.

She can hear the shrug in her mother’s voice when she speaks, too calm, too casual. “Then I don’t know where he is either.”

The masked man’s mouth pulls down, nods to the gunman behind Laurel and suddenly there’s a shattering explosion behind her eyes as breath-stealing pain crackles across her skull like lightning, beginning in her temple and radiating outwards, leveling everything in its path.

Laurel’s vision goes blurry, black at the edges, and when she can think through the sharp spikes of pain through her whole body she feels like she’s underwater, all sound, all sights gone distant, hazy. Everything is slanted too, everything suddenly titled to the side and it takes Laurel long, long moments while everyone else is screaming around her before her echoing brain allows her to understand that everything is on its side because _she_ is on her side, lying sprawled across the floor, rough carpet digging fine gouges into her cheek and something wet, sticky slipping slowly across her forehead. Blood, she decides finally, as she tastes the coppery tang of it on her tongue, the sharp bite of it spreading through her throat from where she bit the inside of her cheek as she was hit.

She can still hear the shouting above her, far beyond her like words descending from god himself. She doesn’t know what they’re saying, doesn’t know why everyone’s still screaming. Surely by now her mother has told the men with guns where her father is, surely he has emerged from hiding if he’s anywhere near the house. Surely the men have what they need and can go away now, leave her and her family alone and let Laurel go back to sleep and wake up when this nightmare is over, wake up with her house hers again, safe and small and not a place where strangers can burst in, demand answers and exact terrible violence when they are not paid what they believe they’re due.

She closes her eyes, tries to let sleep come for her, sweep her away in the gentle tide of it's embrace. But then there’s a hand against her shoulder, rough and impatient and when Laurel’s eyes open she’s startled that the hands belong to her mother and yet are like nothing like the soft, soothing touches she has known all her life.

Her mother is gone, Laurel thinks, and some new creature now wears her face. That thought terrifies her far more than the men with guns and diamond-hard eyes; the knowledge that her mother is not really her mother anymore, is some other fearsome woman who’s stolen her mother’s life.

At six she could barely conceive of her father as a public figure, as a man who belonged not just to her but to the city, to the working people. She had seen him on TV, surrounded by throngs of people chanting his name, his slogans but wasn’t yet able to really understand what they were cheering her father for, what they sought or hoped to seek from him. She knows, with the distance of time, the distance of _distance_ that she could not have, at the time, wrapped her child’s mind around the idea of her mother as anything other than that; her mother, as having a life outside of Laurel’s home, beyond the minutiae of caring for her, her father, her brothers. She could not then have thought of her mother as just as dedicated, just as involved in her father’s cause, perhaps more so. She could not think of her mother as anything other than her mother, but with hindsight, with the cold, emotionless examination Laurel forces on herself, she sees, only later, only when she’s practically an adult, all the things she missed as a child.

Her mother’s presence in the kitchen during her father’s meetings with his advisors for one, six year old Laurel thought nothing of that, simply thought of the kitchen as her mother’s domain, always puttering around, making tea, empanadas, rice and beans for their dinner, but fifteen year old Laurel was able to recognize it for what it was, an aberration that suggested her mother’s long involvement in her father’s world of politics, of angry resistance. Fifteen year old Laurel could see that had her mother simply been her mother she would have been kicked out of the kitchen same as Laurel was, same as her brother’s were, kept out of the way of the men and their plans and their arguments, shunted to the side in favor of more important things.

But her mother, well, her mother was included, and sometimes her mother would help her father work on speeches, sometimes she would go to rallies instead of her father and sometimes there would be muffled arguments just between her mother and father, low and tense with anger that Laurel never certain were about her, her brothers and with distance eventually concluded had nothing to do with the children, everything to do with politics, with tactics.

“Laurel,” her mother says, steel behind her voice, eyes cold and distant. “Get to your feet. Go stand with your brothers.”

Laurel does as she’s told, jaw clenched tight, dashing her knuckles against her eyes, wiping away what she thinks at first is tears, realizes only later is blood, pushes herself to her feet and tries to steady herself as the world tilts, shifts, slow and sickening, her stomach churning. Daniel holds a hand out to her and Laurel stumbles forward, takes his fingers in her smaller ones and clings on for dear life, afraid that she will drift away if Daniel is not there to hold her down, tether her to the earth.  
Blood continues to slide past her tongue from the rip in her cheek and Laurel wants to spit, wants to vomit, wishes her stomach would settle as nausea creeps up, settles as a hard pit of something at the back of her throat. Daniel squeezes her hand in his, and though she wants to creep closer, press her face into his stomach, her shoulder against his thigh she resists the urge, stands tall and angry like the defiant woman who has taken her mother’s place. If this is her mother now, Laurel thinks, she will be fearsome and iron boned like her, will do what it takes to survive this strange new world where men with hard eyes, cruel mouths pull her out of bed, crack her skull apart with their weapons.

The man who spoke, the man who ordered the gun against her temple rounds on her mother now, venom in his voice. “Tell me where your husband is or I’ll put a bullet in her head next.”

Laurel doesn’t flinch, can’t flinch, because she can barely understand what’s being said, barely work her slow moving brain around the threat that’s just been issued.

Her mother glances at Laurel quickly, eyes softening just slightly as it lingers on Laurel’s face. “I don’t know,” she says, chill returning to her voice, so frigid and emotionless that a tremor passes through Laurel’s body, shakes her down to her fingertips. “I told you already, I have no idea where he’s gone. And you can stay here and wait for him or you can get the hell out of my house and go look for him if you want him that badly.”

The man hums, smiles thinly, smiles like a blade. “I think we’ll wait for a while. It’s still hot out and I have people who can go look for him. I think I’ll have more success here though.”

“Make yourself at home,” her mother says sarcastically, and for the first time since she woke, Laurel thinks she hears something of her mother, her real mother, in the voice of the woman wearing her mother like a cloak, like a disguise. It’s the kind of thing she’d say to Laurel’s brothers when they’d come into the house, dusty and dripping with sweat, soccer ball still moving between their bodies like starlight, little chests heaving and knees, elbows knocking into the counters, tables, each other.

“Thank you,” the man says, corner of his mouth twitching. “I’ll take a beer. Tecate if you have it.”

Her mother shrugs, quirks an eyebrow casually, ever unflappable. “Corner store might still be open. Help yourself.”

The twitch to his mouth vanishes. “The only reason I haven’t shot you is because I still have hope that you’ll lead me to Jorge.”

“And here I thought you were thinking of the children,” she bites back.

“I don’t give a shit about your children,” he snaps, baring his teeth to her like he wishes to sink them deep into her throat.

Beside her, Julian whimpers, and Laurel is filled with a disgust for her brother so heavy, so sharp that it steals away what’s left of her breath, sets the edges of her vision wavering again. “I’d shoot all four of them if I thought it’d get me closer to your husband.”

Her mother scoffs, mocking. “Shoot them, don’t shoot them, you’re not getting any closer to him by being here. You know that right?”

“Don’t tempt me,” the man tells her as the gunman to the left of Laurel raises his weapon, points it at Daniel’s chest.

“Don’t joke about murdering children,” she counters, jaw snapping tight.

“I wish I was joking,” he says, giving a little nod to the man who raised his gun and just like that, it lowers, pointed at the floor again. “But I never joke. I’ll kill whoever I must to get Jorge.”

“Then you’re gonna kill a lot of people.”

The man hums, settles himself, loose limbed and casual into her father’s chair, eyes fixed on the door. “Sit,” he tells them and at the prompting of the men with their guns, the fingers hovering close to triggers, Laurel, her brothers all shuffle cautiously to the couch, sink into the cushions, Daniel pulling Laurel into his lap, pulling her little body against his chest, his fingers carding through her hair, still slick with blood, smoothing over her forehead. Laurel squirms, in pain, in frustration, feeling stifled and tight and sick, slips from Daniel’s arms to the floor, leaning back against his knees and watching, unblinking, the silent battle being waged between her mother and the head gunman.

They sit like that, Laurel, her brothers, her mother, the men and their guns for hours, until the first rosy light of dawn begins to creep across the floorboards, set the shadows in the living room glowing. Julian and Adrian fall asleep, Laurel can hear the soft sighs of their breaths, feel Adrian’s knee, loose and sprawling against her shoulder, but Daniel remains awake, his hand occasionally reaching out to brush against her shoulder, remind her that he’s there.

“Well,” the leader says finally, voice crisp, clapping his hands together and rising to his feet once the first bar of sunlight reaches the toe of his boot. “I think we’ve waited long enough.”

“What?” her mother asks hoarsely, swallowing convulsively, eyes wide and shot through with a sudden wildness that Laurel thinks approaches fear as she follows the man to her feet.

“For your husband,” the man clarifies politely, giving her mother what Laurel decides is an apologetic smile, though his voice is full of malice. “I think he knows we’re here, and he won’t return until we’re gone. But in order to make sure, to be certain he knows I dropped by, I think it will be necessary to leave a message.”

“What?” her mother asks again, a note of hesitation, a tremble in her voice, betraying the first signs of fear.

“I’m sorry to have to do this,” he tells her, giving a little nod to the gunman to his left, still standing at attention even hours later. He turns to Daniel then, eyes straying to Laurel and then back up to her brother. “Son,” he says, voice suddenly gentle.

“Get your siblings up. Get them up and take them to a neighbor’s. Ok?”

Laurel can feel Daniel stiffen behind her, feel the blooming terror in his skin. She can feel too when he nods, when he reaches out and shakes Adrian and Julian awake. Laurel doesn’t move, just keeps her eyes fixed on her mother, on the convulsive clench of her hands into fists, the way her spine straightens by degrees, shoulders rolling back until she can stare back, defiantly at the masked leader.

Her mother directs a nod at Daniel, who, having shaken Adrian and Julian awake, lingers on the couch, unmoving. “It’s ok, _mijo_ ,” her mother tells Daniel, a sudden softness in her voice. “Go ahead and go to Lorena’s. Wake her up if you must. She’ll know what’s happened.”

“Mama,” Daniel pleads, voice cracking, fingers tightening, stiff and painful around Laurel’s shoulder until she hitches her shoulders, shucks off his touch, too heavy and too painful.

“Daniel, my love,” her mother says, an edge of urgency in her words. “I need you to do as I say, alright. Take Laurel and the boys and go to Lorena’s. Everything will be fine.”

Laurel hears the lie in her mother’s voice, hears the falsehoods ringing through, recognizing the deceit even in this new, strange woman’s voice. Daniel must not, or must ignore it because Laurel can tell he nods, feels him tap her brothers to get them to their feet. “Lorena’s,” he echoes hollowly. “Everything will be fine.”

Laurel follows Daniel to her feet but doesn’t move after that, roots her feet to the ground and plants herself, sturdy and firm, unmovable. Except she is no match for Daniel, thirteen now and taller, broader than Laurel can stand against. He presses a hand between her shoulder blades, pushes forward and Laurel is forced to take a step or risk pitching forward onto the ground. She still sways slightly on her feet, as though the ground has taken on the gentle roll of the ocean, skull still split through with pain.

Daniel plants a hand on her shoulder, steers her towards the door, Julian still clinging to his leg and Adrian trailing after. Her progress stalls in the hallway and she ducks under Daniel’s arm, freezes and turns her body back towards the living room. Daniel, preoccupied by the other boys, lets her go, or doesn’t notice she’s no longer following.

Laurel focuses on the voices echoing from the living room, raised now in anger, no longer assuming the pretense of politeness, of anything but naked violence. She creeps forward, presses her face to the doorjam so she can see into the living room, watch whatever horror is barreling down at them.

“This is your last chance,” the man tells Laurel’s mother casually, voice devoid of emotion as though he’s already bored by the interaction. “You know what I’ll do if you don’t give up your husband.”

Her mother nods, swallows slowly, eyes straying to Laurel huddled still in the doorway. Laurel can swear she sees her mother in them, her real mother, sees the fear and love and defiance shining in them before she looks away, glances back at the masked man, her chin held stiff and sharp. “I do.”

And then the shot rings out.

And then Laurel’s mother crumples, a puppet with its strings cut, hits the floor with a sickening thump. And then blood is pouring out of her, pooling against the carpet, pooling over her chest, hot and red and so, so much of it, thick and stinging Laurel’s nostrils and she wants to shut her eyes, wants to shut her brain but she can’t, she can’t, she continues to watch, continues to watch her mother, unmoving except for the spread of blood blooming like some strange, exotic flower across her chest.

There’s a terrible rasping, wheezing noise coming from the hole in her mother’s chest, something that should be her breath, hollow and sucking and Laurel wants to press her hands against the gaping where her mother’s chest once was, stop that terrible sound, stop the terrible spread of blood. But she can’t move, can’t recall how to move her feet, how to work her legs, how her brain connects to her muscles and bones and tendons. She doesn’t know how anything works anymore.

Her mother’s shirt is still buttoned wrong, Laurel thinks, the only thing she can think. Her mother buttoned her shirt on the last night of her life and missed a button and she died with her shirt buttoned wrong, with a buttonhole missed. Her mother is always, always put together, always precise and orderly and she died with her shirt buttoned wrong. Except no one but Laurel will ever know that because the space where her chest once was is a gaping bloody mess and Laurel is the only one who knows, the only person alive who noticed. But it doesn’t matter now, nothing matters now.

Laurel realizes she’s screaming then, screaming high and torn until she feels blood in her mouth again, keeps screaming as the masked men turn towards her with fire in their eyes, screaming even as Daniel’s hands snake around her middle, pull her backwards despite her struggles to surge forward, race to her mother, she keeps screaming as he pulls her out into the street, her hands ripping bloody gouges across his arms as she struggles to break free, but his arms still tightening, vice-like and strong, around her tiny body.

“Laurel,” he hisses in her ear, voice ragged and stuttering, wet and choked with tears. She feels them falling against her hands, hates the way they burn her skin, stops struggling against Daniel’s grasp to send her nails raking down her own arms, trying to rid the feeling of his tears from her flesh. His tears mean its real, mean it really is her mother collapsed, crumpled on the floor in her living room, blood spreading like a tap left running across the tattered carpet, not some imposter, not some stranger who’s disguised herself as Laurel’s mother. “Laurel, stop. You have to stop. We gotta go.”

He puts his hand against her mouth, stifles her breath, her screams but its no use, she can’t stop, doesn’t know how to stop screaming.

She doesn’t respond, can’t stop, just keeps screaming even as she looses her breath, looses her voice, keeps screaming into the night, sound echoing off the alleys, sounding like a chorus of screams, sounding like the whole world is screaming, joining Laurel in her grief, in her horror, in her pain.

She’s screaming when Daniel drags her into Lorena’s front room, screaming when the grey haired woman bundles her, her brothers into her guest bed, her face pale and drawn and jaw tight because she knows, without asking, something terrible has happened, screaming hours later when, as the sun sets, her father creeps into the room, crouches down and rests his chin on the comforter, eyes burning with anger and tears and his voice murderous, when he bundles them up, ushers them all into the back of a panel van, still screaming when she wakes, opens her eyes to find herself surrounded by Mexico City and an unfamiliar apartment, unfamiliar father.

And she’s still screaming when, months later, her father hands them each a plane ticket, a visa, tells them they’re going to the U.S., that they have to leave because of what happened to her mother, what will happen to her father if they remain much longer, the men who were sent after her father, the men who murdered her mother nipping at his heels. She’s still screaming when they reach Palm Beach, only realizing when they enroll her in school, instruct her to start speaking English that she’s not screaming aloud, barely even opening her mouth anymore, even though she can hear her own screams echoing in her ears, still tastes blood at the back of her throat.

Eventually her screams fade; she turns seven, then eight, then nine, learns how to read, write, understand English even though she barely speaks a word of it to anyone, barely speaks a word in any language anymore. She turns ten and her father marries again, a thin, brittle woman who dislikes Laurel instantly because she is nothing like the daughter she imagined for herself when Laurel’s father told her of his children, sullen and too silent, too sharp and far, far too cautious, wary, snapping like the cornered animal she is.

Her father has slowly established himself in the U.S., slowly made himself more American than Mexican, taking money from gringo firms who want to pay their workers less, who want to give them less; insurance benefits, retirement funds, who want to break the backs of unions, of anyone who tries to stand against the companies, the management, who seek to make their lives, their futures better. He takes ludicrous sums of money to infiltrate the workers, spy on their operations, their attempts at resistance, to break the backs of the workers, one by one, leaving them jobless or worse.

He doesn’t care much about legality, about whether he reaches his goal through violence or intimidation or persuasion or blackmail, Laurel’s father cares only about completing the job to the satisfaction of men who hire him, who own him, who let her father loose, teeth bared and shining, who unmuzzle the snarling, vicious thing that lurks inside her father He makes himself filthy rich, using the knowledge he gained as a friend of the workers to switch sides, destroy them.

Her father does it all from a glass and chrome office overlooking Miami Beach, but his hands are soaked with blood all the same, dripping a red so dark its black and Laurel can barely stand to look at him. Every decision he makes stings like a betrayal of her mother, of the things she died for. Laurel certainly rarely speaks to him, rarely speaks to anyone.

But she makes herself into something that has no need for words, that understands the lies and deceits intrinsic in speech, turns herself into a silent, watchful creature, watches for the things she missed as a child, the hidden connections, the lines drawn from one seemingly unconnected event to another, listens to the untruths, the things, the lies that people hide behind their eyes. She turns herself into a girl who will never be surprised again, will never have the rug yanked from beneath her feet, will never be woken in the middle of the night by men with guns, wondering what has happened and why they are there. She becomes her own savior, because its clear that no one else can protect her from the terrible, creeping darkness, from the nightmares that lurk in the human heart.

When she’s eleven Daniel graduates high school, defies their father’s ultimatums and returns to Mexico, to Monterrey, to the warm little house hiding so many ghosts. He finds another ghost there, one Laurel doesn’t think anyone was expecting him to find.

Her mother. Alive. Confined to a wheelchair, her hair, her skin gone grey, her face gaunt and her eyes haunted, but alive, whole, or as whole as she can be.

Daniel calls her, calls Adrian and Julian and tells them all, voice cracking so badly he can barely get the words out, puts their mother on the phone so they can hear her too, her voice deeper, gravelly now, but Laurel recognizes it all the same. Her mother, not the strange woman who took her place that horrible night, but her mother, alive and true.

Her brothers sob over the line, her towering, hulking brothers with the voices like the rumble of earthquakes, sob like the children they were when they last saw their mother. But Laurel doesn’t cry, can’t cry, doesn't feel anything at all. She’s not a girl with a mother, not anymore, whoever this resurrected woman is.

She’s shut her heart and locked it tight somewhere deep in her chest, encased it in cement and steel and razor wire so that not even light can find it.

One by one her brothers go back, like a pilgrimage, like they’re pulled by the magnetic forces that send geese, sea turtles back to the place where they were born, they are all, in turn, drawn back to the little house on the corner, to their mother and her tight hugs and her warm hands.

Laurel goes too, alone, on a whim, one weekend soon after she turns seventeen. It is not the reunion her brothers have, full of tears and smiles and reconciliation. Instead, the first meeting between Laurel and the woman who was her mother is filled with a barely controlled rage Laurel finds herself surprised by, not expecting to feel anything beyond curiosity, a vague nostalgia and maybe some detachment.

Instead, her first words to her mother are accusing, accusing her of abandoning them, of not loving them, not loving Laurel, accusing her of turning her back on her children, of letting them think she was dead, of forcing them to come to her, slinking back like whipped dogs. The screaming is back, Laurel thinks, but she doesn’t care, can’t care as she continues to demand answers of this woman who is not her mother. Why, why, why? Why don’t you love us? Why don’t you love me? Why did you let us think you were dead? Why didn’t you die? Why didn’t you come find us? Why?

Her mother has no answers, certainly none that Laurel can stand to hear.

She storms out before the tea is even poured, goes back to her hotel and empties the minibar within the hour, catches the first flight the next morning back to Miami, still drunk so she can tell herself the pricking behind her eyes, the hard knot in her throat are a product of the vodka, the whiskey and nothing else, that it has nothing to do with her mother, with the empty space in her chest that she knows may never fill.

Laurel is a follower of the truth, has committed herself to finding it, always, but she knows, even then, the lies she is telling herself that let her continue to breathe, that keeps the screaming from her ears, the screaming from her lungs.

She is supposed to go to the University of Florida, follow her brothers up to Gainesville, but she changes her plans the week before deposits are due, chooses Brown instead because its as far away from Florida, from Mexico as she can get. She goes home once the first two years she’s there, spends all of four days in her father’s house before she retreats back to Providence.  
She forces herself back to Florida her junior year, forces herself to pretend that everything’s fine, that her smiles aren't forced, that she can enjoy the company of her father, brothers, that she’s not still screaming into the darkness, the silence of that night in Monterrey.

Its only years later, after Sam and the bonfire and that second terrible night that she understands her mother again, understands the choices that she was forced to make. Weeks after that horrible night of smoke and blood and the heavy pounding of her heart, Laurel calls her mother, sobbing even before the call goes through.

“I’m sorry,” she tries to say, but no words come out, stuck in her throat behind a choking lump she can’t seem to swallow down. She hangs up, calls back an hour later still sobbing, but manages to grit the words out, finally, finally. All the things she couldn’t understand until the second terrible night when all choices deserted her, when she was forced simply to act, to pick between a bad choice and a worse one; to go to the police, confess to a murder or to try and bury the problem, burn the problem, keep herself free, keep everything together, everyone else together when panic burned across their skin and they were reduced simply to feeling, to their basest instincts, when Laurel had to save them because they were incapable of saving themselves. “I’m so sorry Mama.”

She understands her mother now, finally, trying to navigate an impossible tightrope, trying to keep her family safe, keep her children from harm, give her children at least one living parent at the end of the night.

She can understand too why she never contacted Laurel’s father, her brothers, never reached out. It would make her a target again, certainly, but make them a target too, draw the attention of the men who still sought her father’s death, the same men who made it impossible for him to return to Mexico, even after nearly two decades. She remained hidden because she had to, because until Daniel turned up on her doorstep, she thought the risk was too great.

Laurel understands, finally, because she finds herself constrained by the things she cannot say, the risks she cannot take for fear that someone will make the connections, realize the things she has done, the things the people she will protect with her life have done; Wes and Michaela and Connor, and then later, Frank and Bonnie and Asher and yes, Annalise too, even Annalise who’s hard eyes and sharp tongue remind Laurel too much of the woman her mother became on the last night she saw her alive until she saw her alive again, new and clean and resurrected.

It’s funny, she thinks, funny and ironic and so perfectly fitting that the two cataclysmic events in her life, the two terrible seismic shifts, her two before and afters get her back to the beginning, wind her up exactly where she was before, before she was woken to the sound of the splintering door and heavy boots and the metallic click of rifles.

She laughs through her sobs and her mother certainly hears it because she begins laughing too, light and flashing even over the terrible phone connection. “Don’t be sorry,” her mother tells her, voice tight around her words, but laughter still running like a current through the sounds. “Never be sorry. Let me be the sorry one.”

“I didn’t understand,” Laurel whispers. “I couldn’t understand what you did and now I do. I didn’t even try.”

“Laurel, _mija_ ,” she whispers, so low Laurel has to strain to hear and her stomach swoops, disorientingly, to hear her mother use that term of endearment, tilting and jarring and Laurel feels like a child again, feels like she’s six years old and her mother is apologizing that her father couldn’t make it to her school play, scolding her for sneaking an extra cookie, pressing a long kiss to her temple before sending her up to bed. It’s the same, perfectly, disarmingly the same, and yet it’s nothing like her mother, nothing like what she remembers. “It wasn’t your job to understand, you were a child and I’m so, so sorry I couldn’t explain, that I didn’t have time to explain. I’m sorry that you had to doubt for so long.”

Laurel’s answer is to sob, wet and ugly, over the line while her mother whispers soothing nonsense in her ear just like she would when Laurel was small, which just makes her sob harder, gasping and shuddering.

She isn't sure after she hangs up whether she’ll ever call again, but she does, three days later, calls a third time the following weekend, keeps calling through that first horrible semester.

And when she storms out of her father’s at Christmas she uses his credit card, even though she knows he’ll be furious, to book a ticket to her mother, waits a whole forty eight hours before she can summon the courage to knock on the door of the little house on the corner where she was born, where she was born anew that terrible night of blood and screams and splintering.

But she does knock, knocks and goes in and even hazards a small, stiff hug of her tiny mother, made tinier in her wheelchair. She lets herself smile sheepishly when she pours herself whiskey instead of tea, lets herself feel a little guilty at drinking in front of this woman who is her mother, who would have, should have scolded her about all the nights she spent stumbling home, blurry eyed and reeking of smoke, of stale beer as a teenager, who would let her slink off to bed and save the lecture for the morning when her head pounds, her mouth packed tight with cotton, when the lecture would hurt more.

She lets herself keep her hand resting against the plastic tabletop when her mother reaches out, takes Laurel’s hand in hers, lets herself relax into the touch, familiar and unknown at the same time, her mother’s hands strangely the same, like calling up a distant memory Laurel didn’t even know she had.

And when the night comes when she and Wes and Michaela and Connor are facing Annalise in the darkness of the Hapstall’s mansion, when the third terrible night comes, when Annalise offers Laurel a gun with words she knows will cut her to the bone Laurel knows what she must do.

She’s grateful only later, so exhaustingly grateful that Annalise never mentioned her mother that night, never used her mother against her to get Laurel to do her bidding, to take the shot Annalise demanded. If the other woman had, Laurel knows, certain, she would not have been able to resist, would not have been able to step back from the edge, would not have been able to keep from sending the bullet between Annalise’s eyes.

Annalise knew this, Laurel thinks, knew that there were some wounds she couldn’t press against, some things too raw, bloody to be able to guess at the consequences of dredging them up from the bottom where they lurk, silent and still with flashing eyes and sharp, grim smiles.

But on that third terrible night, Laurel knows she must do what her terrible, fierce mother would have done, do what’s best for the people she loves, the people who rely on her. So she steps back from the gun, refuses to take the offered bait, the offered excuse, determined to find another way that protects the strange, wounded family she’s been reborn into.

And when Wes takes the gun, takes the bait, sends a bullet ripping through Annalise’s stomach she knows, as her mother must have known, with a strange, sharp clarity, exactly what she must do, sees the only path left open to her. She takes the gun and Wes’ heavy, crippling burden and takes the blame and tells them all she was the one who shot Annalise.

Because Wes, lovely, sweet, no longer innocent Wes can barely handle his own knowledge of what he’s done, his own gnawing guilt and she knows, because she knows Wes, that he will not be able to handle the others knowing too, cannot handle the changed looks, the too long, lingering glances, the hesitation in their voices when they speak to him.

And she knows too, that the others, Michaela and Connor and Asher won’t be able to handle knowing what Wes did, who he has become, no longer sweet and innocent, no longer anything like the puppy he once was. If they knew the truth, Laurel thinks, they would have to think about the people they’ve become too, the changes the terrible nights have brought about in them, confront the things they are now, twisted and stunted and terrible, the people they are now, after.

But Laurel always had a darkness about her, had since that first night when she was six years old, and they had all seen it, all been able to recognize the shadow that lurked behind her eyes, even if they didn’t realize what it was. They could all sense, from the very beginning, that even underneath her silence, underneath the nicknames like ‘Wallflower’ and ‘the quiet one,’ Laurel was something dangerous, something dark. They could accept that she was the same, they were the same, that nothing had been altered, shifted in them by the things they had done, the things they’d seen. And Laurel allows them the lie, the lie needed to protect them, did what her mother would have done, understanding finally, fully, the things her mother did, the person she had to be.

And when the disaster of her 1L year ends, she doesn’t, she can’t remain in Philly, doesn’t take a Big Law associateship like the rest of the Keating 5, doesn’t go after Frank, try to seek him out, though she remains in furtive, skulking communication with him as he tries to figure out a way back, a path to forgiveness for the things he’s done.

She goes to Mexico instead, back to her mother’s house, and though things are still hard, still raw and bloody and bruised, still stilted because its been seventeen years and her mother has missed so much, isn’t really Laurel’s mother anymore, has no right to give Laurel advice about her life, it gets better, it gets easier. And the longer Laurel’s there, the more the heavy choking weight against her chest eases. She volunteers at a legal clinic in town, goes with her mother to visit friends, family she hasn’t seen since she was small, shops at the market and cooks for the two of them and goes on long, exhausting runs through town till her breath burns and her limbs ache and slowly it gets easier, slowly Laurel starts being able to breathe again.

And one day she wakes up, one sizzling day in late July and she pads downstairs in her bare feet and she doesn’t glance at the place on the floor where her mother fell, broken and bloody, doesn’t flinch when her mother tugs Laurel to her and places a kiss against her cheek, just smiles and turns to put the coffee on.

There was before, Laurel thinks, and there was after and there may be something else entirely, some third thing that’s both and neither. She’s not the same, will never be the same as she would have been had that first terrible night not happened, but she thinks now that maybe it’s ok, that she’s no longer pining for some lost life, some idealized past, that the life she has now, messy and complicated and sometimes violent, sometimes terrifying is her life, hers and no one else’s and maybe that’s ok.

There are dividing lines in her life, befores and afters, but maybe Laurel thinks, they’re not what she assumes they are, not terrible, earth shattering black swan events, not things that changed her entirely into some new creature, maybe there’s still some kernel of that small, wiry girl she thought was lost that terrible night, some inner innate Laurel-ness that kept itself alive and whole and breathing even when everything around her was chaos. She likes that, Laurel thinks, smiling to herself as she fills the coffee pot, pours the ground beans into the filter, that it is not simply before and after, not quite so black and white as that, but many befores, many afters, a whole continuum of events that shaped her, some good, some bad, that have turned her into the woman standing, bare footed and bare shouldered, sleepy eyed and tousled haired, in a patch of sunlight in a warm little kitchen in the house where she was born, the house where she had long thought she had died.

But she didn’t die that night, just as surely as her mother hadn’t, hadn’t died at all, but crawled from the wreckage, stronger and sharper and smarter, and softer too, eventually, softer and warmer and better able to love, forgive, understand, better able to live. There was before and there was after and there were a hundred, thousand, million moments in between, and those, Laurel thinks as she turns, meets her mother’s soft gaze, her softer smile, those are the ones that matter.

**Author's Note:**

> Title, in case anyone cares/doesn't know, is just "before and after"


End file.
